USA | The firing squad’s return is a defeat for death penalty supporters

The method is a vivid reminder of the brutality of state killing. That undermines the pro-capital-punishment narrative

On 11 April, South Carolina executed Mikal Mahdi by firing squad. Mahdi had been convicted and sentenced for the 2004 killing of an off-duty law enforcement officer.

One month before his execution, South Carolina put Brad Sigmon to death using the same method. He was the first person since 2010 to be killed by the firing squad. Both Mahdi and Sigmon chose the firing squad from a menu of three ways to die, the others being lethal injection and the electric chair.
Five days after Sigmon’s execution, Idaho became the first state in the country to make the firing squad its primary method for putting people to death. It is one of five states, along with Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah, where it is an authorized execution method.

These developments suggest that death by firing squad is gradually returning to the capital punishment landscape in this country. But as Sigmon’s lawyer, after witnessing his execution, remarked: “It is unfathomable that, in 2025, South Carolina [or any other state] would execute one of its citizens in this bloody spectacle.”

But whether unfathomable or not, the return of the firing squad is, at best, a mixed blessing for death penalty supporters.

On the one hand, it allows death penalty states that have had difficulty obtaining lethal injection drugs to get back into the execution business. South Carolina is one example of this development.

Unlike other death penalty countries, which tend to stick with one execution method over long periods of time, we have substituted one method for another or added new methods so that now, six execution methods are legal and authorized in this country.

At the same time, the resurrection of the firing squad serves as a vivid and troubling reminder of the brutality of state killing. As such, it undermines the legitimating story of capital punishment in the United States.

As proponents of the death penalty tell it, that story is one of adaptation and progress. Our methods of execution, they believe, have become more civilized. The United States has moved from one method of execution to another in a quest to find a means of putting people to death that would square with the constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

Over the past century and a quarter, rather than being uneasy about the novelty of an execution method, pro-death-penalty forces have tried to sell it as an advantage. They have tied capital punishment’s fate to technological progress in our capacity to kill.

The focus on technology as a way of sidelining the moral question of whether we should use the death penalty at all is a characteristically American view, dating at least to the 19th century. That is why, unlike other death penalty countries, which tend to stick with one execution method over long periods of time, we have substituted one method for another or added new methods so that now, six execution methods are legal and authorized in this country.

In advocating for various methods, death penalty supporters have focused on two supposed virtues: novelty, and the reduction of pain. A recent example is the embrace of nitrogen hypoxia in Alabama and Louisiana, which might appear to fit that narrative.

First, it is novel. The country’s first use of nitrogen hypoxia occurred in January 2024, when Alabama executed Kenneth Eugene Smith.

Second, as Scientific American notes: “At the hearings [in Alabama] where the method was introduced, legislators heard stories of pilots and scuba divers dying when they accidentally breathed pure nitrogen instead of the proper mix of nitrogen and oxygen.” Their deaths were quick, proponents of nitrogen hypoxia claimed.

An Oklahoma legislator who introduced the bill authorizing nitrogen hypoxia in his state argued: “The process is fast and painless. It’s foolproof.”

The promise that execution will be fast and painless is also one reason for the firing squad’s revival. One example of that promise is provided by the law professor Deborah Denno, who says: “The firing squad is the only current form of execution involving trained professionals, and it delivers a swift and certain death”.

She cites “a 1938 Utah study – the only one of its kind”, which “monitored an inmate while he was being executed by a firing squad and it showed the death occurred in under a minute”. That is why “it really should be brought back … if we’re going to continue to have the death penalty.”

CNN quotes another expert, Dr Jonathan Groner, a professor of surgery at Ohio State University College of Medicine, who claims that the firing squad “is thought to cause nearly instant unconsciousness … firing bullets into a person’s heart would instantly stop the blood flow to the brain, which, like a cardiac arrest, causes rapid loss of brain function”.

Or, as the Idaho state representative Bruce Skaug, one of the sponsors of the recently enacted firing squad bill, explained: ​“At first when you hear firing squad, if you’re not familiar with the history, you think ​‘well, that sounds barbaric,’ is what I’ve heard from some … It is certain. It is quick."

Whether or not that is the case, this part of the story about the firing squad fits in well with the progress story about methods of execution. But it does not fit well with the story’s commitment to novelty in execution methods.

Indeed, its use in this country dates back to 1608, when Capt George Kendall in Virginia was executed for being a spy for Spain. And, as the New York Times reports, during the Civil War, “both Union and Confederate troops used firing squads to kill deserting soldiers. The executions were intended to inspire fear, as they were typically carried out in public.”

Of all execution methods, the firing squad has been used the least. About 140 people have been executed that way in the US. That is about a tenth of the total number of lethal injection executions.

The firing squad has been used so rarely because it is so violent. It mimics the very thing that it is meant to discourage.

When states like Idaho or South Carolina bring back this relic of a bygone era, they signal the weakness, not strength, of the pro-death penalty forces at this moment in the history of capital punishment. Desperate to kill, they would take us “back to the future” in the world of execution methods.

“The firing squad,” as Professor Corrina Lain observes, “shows what the death penalty is, which is the state shedding blood in your name.”

The execution of Mikal Mahdi was a vivid reminder of that fact. His death is just the latest moment for all of us “to know,” as supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor puts it, “the price of our collective comfort … before we blindly allow a state to make condemned inmates pay it in our names.”

Source: theguardian.com, Austin Sarat, April 15, 2025. Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 hundred books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty.

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde